word she said had anything to do with Sidney
Prale, or Rufus Shepley, or anybody connected in any way with the
Shepley murder case.

"Now you must let Marie take you to the Park, father," he heard the girl
say. "It is a splendid day, and you must get a lot of fresh air. You can
go down and watch the animals. I'm going out now, but I'll be back some
time during the afternoon, and then we'll talk about things."

Jim Farland waited in the vacant apartment until he heard Kate Gilbert
depart. A quarter of an hour later, he opened the front door a crack and
saw the gigantic Marie wheel out the chair with Mr. Gilbert in it. They
went down in the elevator.

Farland waited for another quarter of an hour, until the old janitor
came up and told that he had watched the maid wheel Mr. Gilbert into the
Park.

"I'll just leave the elevator up here until somebody rings," the old
janitor said, "and I'll watch the floor below from the top of the
stairs. Then, if any of them come back, I'll tell you so you can get
out."

He took his station at the head of the stairs, leaving the elevator door
open so that the contrivance could not be operated from below. Jim
Farland unlocked the door of the Gilbert apartment and stepped inside.

The first glance told him that it was an ordinary apartment furnished in
quite an ordinary manner. It certainly did not look like a home of
wealth, and Sidney Prale had said that it had been understood in
Honduras that Kate Gilbert was of a rich family and traveling for her
health.

Many tourists claim to have money when they are away from home, of
course, but the part about traveling for her health seemed to Jim
Farland to be going a bit too far. Would such a woman be traveling for
her health and leave behind her at home an old father who was an
invalid?

"There's something behind that little trip of hers," Farland told
himself. "It looks to me as if she had gone down to Honduras to look up
Sid Prale for some reason. And Honduras isn't exactly on the health-trip
list, either."

He began a close inspection of the apartment, leaving no trace of his
search behind him, disarranging nothing that he did not replace. Jim
Farland was an expert at such things.

He ransacked a small desk that stood in one corner of the living room
and found a tablet of writing paper similar to that upon which had been
written the anonymous messages Sidney Prale had received. He found
scraps of writing in the wastebasket, too,